Hawking on LHC & Pure Research
Stephen Hawking
Source: NASA
Today, British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking was interviewed by BBC Radio 4 and had some intriguing things to say in reference to the Large Hadron Collider and related topics.
One topic addressed was the importance of pure scientific research, a topic I recently addressed as well. In Hawking's words, the Large Hadron Collider, which officially starts tomorrow with its "first beam" through the entire 27-kilometer collider, is "vital if the human race is not to stultify and eventually die out."
In answer to questions about practical benefits, the bane of any pure research project, he said, "Throughout history, people have studied pure science from a desire to understand the universe, rather than practical applications for commercial gain. But their discoveries later turned out to have great practical benefits."
Hawking, of course, has devoted his career largely to the study of black holes and is specifically noted for his theory of Hawking radiation. In fact, the various doomsday-mongers might give Hawking a bit of hope because if miniature black holes do form within the LHC, they could be tested for the properties he has predicted ... which means that his purely theoretical work could result in a very tangible Nobel Prize.
However, Hawking puts the odds of the formation of microscopic black holes at about 1% and dismisses any claim that they will pose any sort of threat. Collisions in the earth's atmosphere release even more energy on a regular basis and have not destroyed the earth yet, he points out.
Hawking also doesn't think it's very likely that the LHC will successfully observe the Higgs boson, either. He placed a $100 bet that the Higgs boson wouldn't be found. He thinks it will be "more interesting" if we don't find the Higgs, because that means that something is wrong with the current models. (In the "great minds think alike" category, just last week I asked what would happen if the Higgs is not found.)
One other thing which I found most intriguing about Hawking's statements was: "Together they [the LHC and the space program] cost less than one tenth of a per cent of world GDP. If the human race can not afford that, then it doesn't deserve the epithet 'human'."
Could it be that these costly enterprises, which are the sorts of experiments which will ultimately save the human race from annihilation, truly amount to so little in the grand scope of human production? When you look at all of the major accomplishments of mankind, I wonder how much time and energy has gone into them, compared to the time and energy which is so often wasted on other areas of our lives...
Related Articles:
- The New York Times - Hawking Anticipates Collider's Start
- BBC News - On the Hunt for the Higgs Boson (this includes an audio of Hawking)
- The Telegraph - Stephen Hawking: Large Hadron Collider vital for humanity
- National Geographic - Large Hadron Collider to Have "Practical" Spin-Offs?
Comments
he is absolutely right! we may not get to see the Higgs Boson; yet the experiment is worth every penny spent on it! Mankind needs these to prepare itself to face future challenges from unexpected quarters!
I wish the scientists success in their efforts and i applaud them for every second of their time they spent on it!!
hahaha stephen hawking is english? wow, i couldnt tell from his accent
Nothing to worry about the experiment. Such experiments give insight and open gates to future knowledge. Higgs boson found or not found, something else would be found.
Not many comments. Where is everybody?
I am very interested in the LHC and all that, but by far the most important point Hawking made is to illustrate how absurd it is to complain about the cost of LHC.
Another way of saying it is that the cost of the LHC is equivalent to 9 days worth of US war spending.
Attempting to spend the same amount of money on “feeding the poor” would in the long-run be
a far less humane investment.
To not find out what we’re going to find out would be like not inventing the wheel.
Anyone who’se given any amount of informed thought to this and still thinks it’s a waste of money ought to be in a loony bin.
Similarly, perople like Robert Zubrin explained long ago how we could have gone to Mars (and begun colonising it!) decades ago for an utterly insignificant amount of money and effort. If our education systems weren’t pathetic then people would understand this.
Or perhaps with a little more funding into nuclear fusion (and a little He3 mining on the moon) we could’ve got that Lawson parameter down to a respectable value long ago hence all be happily guzzling away our energy for peanuts (and only 1% of the present levels of radioactive waste)
Alas, the population in general are more interested in a life of mindless slavery and strife, behaving like cavemen squabbling over a diseased carcass (or a barrell of oil) while all the time untold riches and pleasures are simply there for the taking.
And before anyone says stuff like “science nuts gave us the bomb” perhaps they’d like to spend a little time thinking about what squalor and misery we’d all be living in without it.
If we humans press self-destruct before we’ve
secured our future then it’s no more than we deserve. We would’ve had our chance and blown it, giving the bacteria a well-deserved oppurtunity to evolve into something better
than us infantile losers.
Ummm….OK, you seem a bit full of yourself and you seem as though this LHC will save mankind. Sorry, but I have deep skepticism that it will do any such thing.
No, I am not a doomsday proclaimer. I personally could care less if it spawned a black hole. Strike that, it would be about the coolest and exciting thing that could possibly happen with the LHC. I just think that nothing much is going to come from this.
I will sit back and yawn and think, man, we could have spent that money on fighting poverty or giving everyone a bottle of Vodka to drink whilst Russia and the U.S. go off on a collision course of even greater historical implications than this damned LHC.
IMHO
Mark, I’m not full of “myself”.
In my rant I made no claim about any of my own achievments (and feel no need to do so now either). I just admire the efforts of the scientists involved with the Standard Model, the LHC, etc.
and am deeply frustrated by the way in which
a very large number of people are criticising
this type of thing whilst obviously having no idea whatsoever what they’re talking about.
To complain about the cost of LHC is like spending 10 quid on a pizza then blaming the plight of the poor on someone who refused to give them a penny.
Last night there was a story on the news about the “massive” energy bill of 14million pounds per year. That works out at 20somethinh pence per UK citizen.
Of course it’s scandalous that there are so many people in the world enduring a very raw deal. If you want to point at money and effort that would be better directed at attempting to help them then how about picking on the perfume or Rizla industry
or something, rather than something like LHC?
The world’s hungry don’t need money so much as food and freedom from tyrrany.
I also made no “doomsday” predictions!
Does anyone know how the data that would’ve come out of the SSC (if it had been completed) what with the inferior computing power available back then?
For those who don’t know:
SSC was “Super Conducting Super Collider” which would’ve had an 87km circumference (LHC is only a puny 27km)
if funding hadn’t been pulled in 1993.
You need a lot of computing power to make sense of the data coming out of these machines…
The world wide web was invented at CERN, by the way.
Wow Tim! You obviously ARE full of yourself. I never said anything about you, personally, being full of yourself. That was directed more at the author of the article, but By Gawd Man! You sure do fit the bill.
You’re also a pompous twit of a science lover, but that’s nothing new. You Sci-Religious nuts are the same. Your science will save mankind! No, it won’t. You’ll maybe unearth some clues that may spring a line of clothing with some unique properties or maybe a new bed mattress, but that’s about it.
Look, all I’m saying is that give yourselves a break. Everyone knows that science screws things up majorly before they get it close to correct. At least you have that over religion, eh?
Seriosuly Tim, don’t think everyone’s talking about you….they’re not. You’re not that important.
OK Mark, I take back some of it since I wrongly thought you were attacking me not Hawking.
If you feel that way about HIS views then there’s no hope at all for US seeing eye to eye.
I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree about a few things. The last I’ll say about it is
(a) Science lovers are by no means all the same. They have many different points of views about all this.
(b) The Russia/Georgia thing is even more of an insignificant blip than the Cold War itself.
Man, I love the whole implication that Pure Science is somehow worthless.
The definitions are that Pure Science explores the realms where we find out stuff we don’t know, and Applied Science is where we take the stuff we have found out and find ways of doing something practical and useful with it…
Hence, the only way to actually find completely brand new stuff to apply in a practical way and make the most revolutionary developments is to pursue pure science research.
So, where does the animosity toward pure research come from?